Cleantech's solar array will be seven times larger than the next closest rival

Portugal announced in April that it was home to one of the world's largest solar
arrays. The 150 acre, 11-megawatt (MW) solar plant was built by Catavento
and PowerLight Corporation and is capable of powering 8,000 homes in Serpa.

Cleantech America LLC., a San Francisco-based company, plans
to build a solar farm that would far eclipse the one built in Portugal. The new
80 MW farm, known as the Kings
River Conservation District Community Choice Solar Farm, will be situated
on 640 acres of land and is scheduled to be completed by 2011.

"We're pretty confident that solar farms on this scale
are going to have an industry-changing impact," said Cleantech CEO Bill
Barnes. "We think it's the wave of the future. This scale of project, I
think, creates a tipping point for renewable energy."

"We think the impact for it will be similar to the
impact of the computer chip," Barnes continued. "So too will
economies of scale like the Community Choice farm drive down the cost of
solar."

Cleantech estimates that the energy generated by the solar
array will be enough to power 20,000 homes.

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quote: you'd just put a three kilowatt array on top of every asphalt shingle roof in California, you'd get a hell of a lot more generation capacity than what they're talking about here, and they could get the owners of most of those houses to finance a bit of it out of pocket rather than out of their taxes.

Simple government bonds would probably provide vastly superior returns -- at current prices. Current prices which would skyrocket if such a plan were pushed, like prices already have thanks to Germany's voracious appetite for solar panels that it can barely efficiently use. Most homes probably also consume much more than what a simple 3kw setup could provide even at high noon on a summer day. Especially at high noon on a summer day.. The economics just don't even come close to being rational.